While my initial speech act level data coding did not reveal knowledge negotiation, the finding that individuals represent and assess knowledge in subsequent speech acts led me to the insight that knowledge negotiation occurs over time at the level of single
discussion. Similarly, knowledge negotiation can be observed by following speech acts longitudinally within discussions. Because knowledge assessment, as described above, happens primarily in two ways (1) agreeing with represented knowledge or 2) disagreeing with represented knowledge, I tentatively formulated that certain combinations of assessments constitute knowledge negotiation. This formulation suggests that knowledge negotiation, as a key sub-process of knowledge transformation, is not in practice a separate stage from knowledge transformation initiation. It also suggests that knowledge negotiation requires individuals to represent and assess knowledge from across the organizational boundary in multiple subsequent speech acts so that eventually a cross-boundary agreement is reached. The notion of reaching an agreement is crucial and analytically separates the negotiation stage from the initiation stage. Furthermore, knowledge negotiation may require knowledge to be clarified to become eventually agreed upon. In the following example, I illustrate how knowledge negotiation occurs in a discussion at the organizational boundary.
This exemplary cross-organization discussion deals with the role of the designated strategy project group after it completes the design for Exurban’s new strategy process.
The discussion includes one facilitator, two strategists from Exurban (E-Strategists 1-2) and one strategist from Metropolitan (M-Strategist), and thus knowledge is negotiated at the organizational boundary. At the beginning of the discussion, E-Strategist 1 represents her knowledge concerning the post-design role of the project group:
“It should become like an evaluative project group after it --- I think it can be the same project. Unless a new name [is given to it]”
Then, E-Strategist 2 assesses knowledge representation and disagrees:
“It wouldn’t be a project anymore; it would be part of the process --- Project, in principle, has an ending.”
However, E-Strategist 1 disagrees with this representation and asks why the project would need to have a specific ending:
“Why would it have to end?”
After this within-organization knowledge negotiation, the discussion moves across the organizational boundary when M-Strategist assesses the represented and negotiated knowledge. She agrees with E-Strategist 1 in that the same group of people can both design and run the new strategy process:
“Why can't it be the same? If we think about Metropolitan, for example the youth strategy, there's the group that creates it --- I don't know if Metropolitan is that different.”
In this speech act, M-Strategist represents knowledge as an example from Metropolitan’s strategic practice. She clarifies the knowledge being negotiated by pointing out that in Metropolitan there actually is a strategy that is run by the same group that created it.
Finally, as a result of this cross-organizational boundary knowledge negotiation,
E-Strategist 1 assesses represented and negotiated knowledge and now agrees with an idea that she previously disagreed with:
“We’ll, it's the same people that are there…”
These five speech acts constitute an example the knowledge negotiation process at the organizational boundary. In the first three speech acts of this discussion, the two strategists from Exurban represented and assessed knowledge within an organization.
Albeit coming from the same organization, they disagreed about the role of the strategy project team – E-Strategist 1 suggested that the project team designing the new strategy process should stay as a management team responsible for running the newly designed process, and E-Strategist 2 disagreed with this idea. This initial disagreement initiated the cross-organizational boundary knowledge negotiation process; next, the strategist from Metropolitan represented knowledge with an example from her own organization. Then, E-Strategist 2 assessed this knowledge representation and eventually altered her knowledge. As a result of this cross-organizational boundary knowledge negotiation process, all three strategists shared the idea that the project design team can stay on and manage the new strategy process. Studies on knowledge transformation at the specialization boundary have identified knowledge negotiation as a key element of the knowledge transformation process at the specialization boundaries, where “dependencies must be redefined and renegotiated,” potentially by taking “the time and energy to establish a new shared language” (Carlile & Rebentisch, 2003:1182). However, this literature does not explain how the knowledge negotiation process unfolds at the organizational boundary. My findings from the organizational boundary extend this
argument by showing that knowledge negotiation occurs as a sequence of cross-boundary speech acts where represented knowledge is assessed by disagreeing and agreeing upon it.
To summarize, knowledge negotiation at the organizational boundary is a process composed of sequential speech acts of representing and assessing knowledge by individuals from different organizations. The assessments take the form of either disagreement or agreement. Both types of assessing are necessary for knowledge negotiation to occur: represented knowledge must be contested by disagreeing, for without any disagreement knowledge is merely transferred (1998) between individuals and no negotiation or knowledge transformation is needed. However, for knowledge to become fully negotiated, the discussion participants have to eventually reach an agreement – if no agreement is reached by the end of a discussion, represented knowledge is then simply rejected, not negotiated nor transferred. I formalize the argument concerning knowledge negotiation as follows:
Proposition 2: When represented knowledge is agreed and disagreed upon across the organizational boundary, knowledge is negotiated and knowledge transformation is enabled
Notably, the key difference between the propositions concerning knowledge transformation initiation (P1) and knowledge negotiation (P2) is that Proposition 1 explains how knowledge transformation processes are initiated, while Proposition 2 suggests that the combination of knowledge agreement and disagreement is a necessary condition for knowledge transformation process to occur. Thus, neither knowledge
agreement nor disagreement alone constitutes a sufficient form of knowledge assessment for knowledge transformation.